Posted
by
Roblimoon Wednesday May 29, 2013 @04:44PM
from the stomp-on-the-magic-kingdom-stomp-stomp-stomp dept.

We're not talking cheap here; Willow Garage PR2 robots list for $280,000 with the academic discount, $400,000 without. Still, spokesman Ryan points out that it can take a PhD candidate two or more years to build a robot chassis and create new software equivalent to Willow Garage's open source robotware. The thought, too, is that if a university buys the robot a lot of students can share it. Sounds good, doesn't it? But much though we might want a robot, it's probably a good thing Slashdot doesn't have one because we'd probably spend all day fighting over who got to use it next.

Tim:
So Ryan, we are standing next to a device that is not running
Android, and it is not running Chrome, what are we looking at here?

Ryan:
Right. So this is the PR2 robot. Basically, this is a robot
development platform that we sell. Normally, we sell these into
university research labs for people doing research on the premise
that if you are doing your PhD, before this guy you’d have to
spend two or three years making the robot before you actually got to
the application part of it. So we try to solve that problem for you.
So right out of the box we give you a really feature-rich robot. And
we also have our robot operating system ROS that is open source and
free. It doesn’t just run on this robot it runs on the PR2 it
runs on 50 to 100 other robots. So you can download, mess around with
it, play with it. Yeah, so right out of the box you can kind of put
up whatever application you have, whatever you can imagine basically
you can program it to do.

Tim:
Now Willow Garage obviously does a lot of work to make the robot. How
much of it is off-the-shelf parts, how much of it are things that are
made custom only for Willow Garage robots?

Ryan:
Right. So most of the machine, sheet metal and mechanical parts are
custom. So I think it is about 60 percent of the total robot is
custom. Stuff off-the-shelf, a lot of the sensors are off-the-shelf,
a lot of the computing components are off-the-shelf, the batteries
are off-the-shelf, while mostly the mechanical stuff is all custom
and sourced locally by machine shops _____1:30
shops.

Tim:
Can you talk a little bit about the grip from the end of this arm
here?

Ryan:
Sure. So this is the gripper. A lot of people have different
preferences in grippers. We went for a simple and more robust
design. So it is just a two finger gripper. Right now we have dummy
fingertips on here, but normally we will have pressure sensitive tips
on here, so you can we have a demo where it will with
this gripper it will crush the egg, but with the sensorized tips on,
it will be able to hold the egg without crushing it. So this gripper
also has an accelerometer in it, so it will do cool demos where it
can do fist pumps, high fives, and the laser the Star Wars
demo you saw before. It also has an LED in here for tracking with
the cameras.

Tim:
Now this arm, how long is it? It is about 3 feet long?

Ryan:
Oh, I don’t know the actually dimensions, probably it looks
like maybe 1 meter and a quarter or so, yeah, it is a 7 degree of
freedom arm, so you can just pretty much it is really flexible for
programing manipulating getting stuff. The gripper is actually 8
degree of freedom. So we have a lot of people who are doing tabletop
manipulations so they bring the robot in front, and have the robot
look at the scene, recognize the objects and then attempt to grasp
them, pick them up, move them around, that kind of thing.

Tim:
What kind of hardware does the robot use in order to recognize
things?

Ryan:
So it has a multitude of sensors, starting at the top, you’ve
got a 3D this is basically a connect sensor so it gives RGB, picture
plus depth data. And this guy is nice. When we designed the robot,
this wasn’t actually out, and we’ve added it to the robot
since. Because it offloads some of the computing power from the
actual CPU. So this is a really kind of game changer. It is really
cheap, really nicely featured sensor, so we use that quite a bit now.
We also have two sets of stereo cameras, one with a narrow, one with
a wide field of view, and with stereo we can do depth perception
also.

We
also have a 5 megapixel global shutter camera. With global shutter it
basically takes a snap of all the pixels at the same time, so you
don’t get motion blur if you are moving. And the other thing
is actually not a camera, this is actually an LED with pseudo random
pattern on it so that we can project onto objects. Like say you have
a white sphere in front of a white wall, you may not see it with a
camera, but if you project on it, you can see the distortion in the
pattern.

Tim:
Can you talk about the actual computing guts of it?

Ryan: So this guy pretty much
in terms of computing it is really nice for software developers. So
in the base there are two servers, they are both identical. Both of
them have two quad cores Xeon processors, so it is a total of 16
cores for the whole robot, each box has 24 gigs of RAM, and I think
1.5 terabytes of hard drive each. There is a lot of computing power.
In fact, the biggest drain on the batteries is from the computers.

Tim:
How many of these are in use around the world?

Ryan:
So we have about 40 of them out in the world right now.

Tim:
And if I wanted to put it on my Amazon credit card, how much would it
hurt?

Ryan:
So the list price for this guy is $400,000. Now if you’re
shooting through the open source community, _____4:55
to ROS, you may qualify for a discount, and then it drops the price
down to $280,000.

Tim:
That’s quite a discount.

Ryan:
Yeah, we are trying to encourage people to use ROS and unify the
software process, so everybody can leverage off each other and
leverage from what everybody’s using.